


Pages Of A Diary

by evaivory



Category: The Originals (TV)
Genre: Acceptance, Confusion, Diary Extracts, F/M, Forgiveness, Ghosts, Mentions of a war, Mentions of doppelgangers, New Orleans, Prophetic Dreams, Reincarnation, Revenge, Tatia is a badass, Tatias husband makes an appearance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-29
Updated: 2016-10-29
Packaged: 2018-08-27 17:49:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8410843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evaivory/pseuds/evaivory
Summary: Sometimes in life, the dead don't like staying dead. She learnt a long time ago that living was far more interesting.





	

**Pages Of A Diary**

**Rule Number One: Don't trust anybody.**

Vivienne Johnson was only two months old when this came to her.

She stared up at the strange women that calls herself her mother.

(She isn't, she knows that much.)

_Don't trust anybody._

The sound ringed through her head like a bell, it splits her skull and makes her ears pound in anguish.

She cries, cries large racking sobs with crocodile tears.

The women that calls herself mummy doesn't question it, just picks her up and bounces her up and down. Making the most ridiculous, inhorecent noises she had ever heard.

She's greatful for that, at the very least.

**...**

**Rule Number Two: Magic is real; don't trust it.**

A boy called Tom once showed her that he could make a pebble dissapear, standing in front of her in the playground and shouted magic words at the rock under the blanket.

To impress her, Vivienne thinks, tilting her head to the side as she watched him.

The rock eventually does disappear.

She isn't very impressed.

In fact, the minute she saw the rock was no longer under the thin layer of silk, she runs.

Runs crying to a teacher, and refused to leave their side for the rest of break.

She knows it's only a slight of hand, but she still stays clear of him after that.

_Magic is real._ The voice in her head snarls dangerously, the sound echoing across her skull. _Don't trust it, it only leads to trouble._

She had only just turned four.

**...**

**Rule Number Three: Don't love boys with brown eyes.**

When Vivienne was six, she loved a boy named Cameron.

He was older, maturer, funny, and joked around with his friends.

Everything she dreamed about in a man.

She loves him.

"I love you." She told him, her six year old eyes filled with innocence.

"I hate everything about you, you frizzy haired freak." He spat down to her, running off to laugh about it with his friends.

She hates him.

His eyes had been a rich brown colour.

_Don't love boys with brown eyes._ The voice in her head said coldly, the daggers inside her mind pressing deep into the inside of her brain. _They only lead to heart break_.

She listens.

**...**

She has the same nightmare every night.

She's trapped underground, and people are screaming around her. Crying, sobbing, screeching, wailing.

Some are whispered though, gasped silently and disappear within a moment.

She's six when she realised she was trapped in a wooden box.

She's eleven when she realised it was a coffin.

She's thirteen when she realises it's the dead that are screaming.

She tells her mother, tells her everything like a good girl should.

The women just stares down at her and tells her it will go away eventually.

She's wrong.

**...**

When Vivienne was seven, all the class wrote down their name on a sheet of paper.

She doesn't.

Instead, she writes down the one word she knows, the one that had been stuck permanently on her mind for so many years.

ᛖᛚᛇᚨᚺ

_Elijah_. The voice translates, a hint of sadness in her tone.

The teacher marks it as incorrect, thinking it's just a bunch of scribbles.

(She delights in knowing more than him.)

She doesn't say anything about it.

So, when she is asked to spell her name again, she puts down the other name she knows apart from hers.

Tatia.

Incorrect.

Vivienne.

Correct.

She doesn't write either of the other names down after that.

I'm Vivienne, she tried to convince herself on the walk back home.

_No you're not_. The voice cackles back to her.

**...**

She's fifteen when a boy from Norway strolls into her class.

His name is Erik.

For one second, one very short second, she thought he was the Elijah she was looking for.

_Don't._ The voice quickly warned, a burning hot pain searing through her head. _I spit upon the day we see that dreaded **thing** again._

He isn't though, Erik isn't her Elijah.

She deals.

That's the one thing she had become quite good at recently, dealing.

**...**

She cried in front of the mirror when she was sixteen.

"I'm Vivienne." She chanted under her breath, the faint feeling of life in her belly still lingering, her eyes red and her lips still quivering from sobbing. "I'm Vivienne. I always have been, I've never been anyone else."

Truth.

(Lie.)

Her name means forgiveness.

_Poetic_. The voice muttered when she learnt this. _Isn't that just poetic?_

She asks it what it means by that.

It doesn't answer.

**...**

Vivienne was seventeen when she came across a object that made the back of her head itch with discomfort.

She had been doing an essay on how art had been influenced in the early stages of human life when she came across the artefact.

It sat neatly positioned in the glass cabinet, made of elegantly carved wood. Tiny, smaller than the palm of her hand.

A wooden hair grip stared back at her. The spikes on it dull from age, you could still see the interesting floral pattern on the hem though, even though worn away from the chaos of elements.

It sparked something in her mind, like she was staring at her old favourite toy. Something clicked.

The plaque said it was over a thousand years old.

She turned on her heel and pratically ran out of the museum.

**...**

She's nineteen when she manages to find herself in New Orleans, taking an apprenticeship in teaching.

A man appears on the doorstep of her apartment, saying he lived just upstairs and wanted to introduce himself.

He's lying.

"My name's Marcel." He grinned at her, though his eyes hid his inner emotions very well, she can still read him perfectly.

He was suspicious of her.

As he should be.

"My name is Vivienne." She smiled politely, shaking his outstretched hand.

He relaxed noticeably, confirming that she was just a human.

She counted that as his first mistake.

"Would you like a drink?" She smiled gesturing inside. "I think the electrics are working. Hopefully, anyway."

"Thanks." Marcel said, glancing past her at all the boxes in her soon-to-be living area. "But I've got to dash."

The minute he turned around, she let lose the question the voice was badgering her to ask.

"Do you happen to know someone called Elijah?"

He freezes and says no.

But Vivienne is smart enough to know that means yes.

He comes back for that drink the next day.

Just like she knew he would.

**...**

"Is Vivienne your real name?" Marcel asks her this in a bar one day, they were both celebrating her promotion.

"It's the one on my birth certificate." She joked, sipping on her lemonade as he chugged back another alcoholic drink. "Why?"

"You always hesitate before you say it." He explained, growing slightly serious. "Like you're always second guessing it."

She doesn't answer him.

Probably because she didn't know the answer herself.

**...**

She picks up a book about reincarnation from the library the next day.

She reads, she thinks, she decides.

For once, for a short moment, she's happy.

"Tatia." She finally told Marcel the next time she saw him. "My name is Tatia."

His eyes flicker with recognition, but he didn't comment.

That was the day the voices stopped, and the dream changed.

For a small moment, she hopes that this is the end, hopes that she could just live normally.

Once again, she's wrong.

And she regrets hoping.

**...**

The dreams did change, like her mother said, they got worse.

She faces two different lives all circling around her head.

Reincarnation isn't a pathetic, soppy love story the media played it out to be, she saw that know.

She cries.

Cries for the baby she lost, and the family she had cursed.

Once upon a time, she shoved a knife in her booth, strapped a baby on her back and walked away from the dishonour her husband had decided to taunt her with even after his death in battle.

The unbeatable they had once called him.

Even today, she spits at the feet of the man that fathered her child.

Some things never do change.

Now, she reverts back to being a little girl she never truly had a chance to be, and cries herself to sleep.

The next day, she encased a metal pole in her spine and walked out the door with her head held high.

She doesn't do it for them, she does it for herself.

It had always been for herself.

**...**

"Who are you?" The man in a suit asks her, his rich voice polite but strained, like he was withholding millions of varied emotions.

It's him, she knew the minute him and his family of murderers stepped back into New Orleans after five whole years.

She's twenty when he faces her again.

And she's still not ready.

(She doubts she ever will be)

"My name is none of your business." She spits at him, her chin rising to give her the façade of confidence. "But you may call me Vivienne."

She shoves her way past him, her heels clicking with every stride she took.

She hates him.

Oh; how she hates him.

**...**

We're all ghosts in the end.

Just stories buried six feet underground.

Some of us barely make a mark, while others force time itself to its knees.

In some ways, she did both.

To humans, she was just another lady they would only see in a text book. To vampires, she is just a legend that is said to have created them.

Her story has faced the battering of time and different versions are past down through history.

Some say that she was a Goddess, who decided to bless (or curse) a family with immortality.

Others say she was just a small human girl who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

She raises her glass to both, and laughs at the irony of it all.

**...**

Tatia hated her husband, Aaron, with a cold deep passion.

Yet, she is not the only ghost that doesn't enjoy staying dead.

He appears at her door one windy winter evening.

She knows it's him the minute they lock eyes.

She tries to slam the door in his face, but the body he is possessing is stronger than the shell she is permanently borrowing.

Vivienne Johnson seethes when Hanson Davids struts into her apartment.

"I almost didn't believe it when a witch told me." Hanson commented, cockily falling into one of her leather chairs. "What are you doing in New Orleans Tic-Tak?"

"Do not call me Tic-Tak." She hissed, slamming the door behind him.

"Don't tell me this is about revenge on Mr Fangs?" He groaned, rolling his brown eyes at her. "I thought you were over that."

"I'm not getting revenge on anybody." She snapped, folding her arms across her chest. "How did you find me?"

"Oh, puh-lease." He drawled out, snickering at the expression that painted across her face. "This is the most dragged out revenge story there ever was. Your not that hard to find dear, modern technology is so helpful."

"Get out Aaron." She growls in frustration, gesturing to the door. "You're not welcome here."

He stands and towers over her with his full height, brown on brown.

Ghost on ghost.

"Don't come crying to me when you only end up hurting yourself." He warns her, heading towards the door.

Glass shatters as it hits the place his head was seconds prior.

She spits in his face and doesn't feel a one bit guilty.

He turns up the next month and antagonises her even more.

He is a welcome distraction from Elijah.

**...**

Two months.

Elijah told her of the places he'd been, of all the people he'd met, and she still didn't tell him her name.

He tells her of the doppelgangers, thinking she was just another human that got dragged into his families mess.

She didn't get dragged into it, she walked in willingly because she had a hand in creating it.

"You want to know." She snarls at him, when he once more asked for her name. "Fine! I have had enough of secrets. My name is Tatia, perhaps you've heard of me?"

He freezes, the glass he's holding slipping from his fingers and falling to the floor.

"Shocked?" She asked sneering at him openly.

"You're alive." He breathed out, studying her to try and find any form of lie on her face. "Tatia, please..."

"Oh, I'm surprised you care. The last time I saw you, you left me for dead." She spat at him, ripping her hand away when he tried to reach for her. "You stay away from me Elijah, for both of us."

Her lips thinned, sharply turning on her heel and marching out the compound, the sound of clicking heels filling his ears as he watched her go.

He doesn't love her, it's more complicated than that, he loves Hayley.

But nothing burns worst than first love.

That she knows.

**...**

She laughs about how poetic it all is.

Four doppelgangers, all living through different times, yet all living the same story.

Four women, once all with the same face, all living the same life.

Two dead, one sleeping, and the other trapped behind a different face.

She laughs, because truly she is the only one meant to be dead.

"I'm sorry." She breathes out to the wind one cold Saturday afternoon, the warm drink in her hands warming her fingertips. "I thrust this fate upon you because I chose to give my child a life instead of tossing her into a fire, and I'm sorry I cursed your life by my own foolish decisions."

Truly though, she doesn't regret anything.

Because she survived, out of all of the doppelgangers, she'd survived.

Not Amara, the woman who loved a God.

Not Katerina, a scared little girl who ran away from home, faced the devil and never returned.

Not Elena, who did everything she could to not be like the rest of them.

Her.

Tatia, the girl who truly began their curse.

Elena can blame Katerina, Katerina can blame her, and she can only blame herself.

But still, she'd won.

Vivienne Johnson was Tatia, and she moved her black queen to D9.

_Checkmate, bitch._

**...**

She turned twenty one when the battle is finally over, and she crowns herself the longest living doppelganger that didn't get turned into a vampire.

Hayley leaves Elijah, she has a child to look after and a city to rule.

Personally, she didn't blame the wolf.

It truly is a death sentence, loving a Mikaelson.

Their exchange is outside the gates of the cemetery, as rain begins to thunder down from above.

Tatia had wandered away from the funeral party, many had fell to the hands of Niklaus and the Mikaelsons, a black umbrella sheltering her from the pounding raindrops as she watched them from where she stood.

The wolf leaves, and he is left alone.

Her pitch black heels click on the pavement as she walked towards him, raising her umbrella so he is sheltered as well.

He doesn't look at her, just stares at the ground and let's her make the first move.

"Hello Elijah."

Her voice is gentle, and she smiles at him carefully as he raised his head and smiled back at her.

"Hello Tatia."

And, in that one small moment, everything changes.

In the long time she had graced this earth, she could only truly vouch for one thing: The dead don't like staying dead.

She smirks as she and fate reset their individual pieces on the board.

_Game on, sweetheart, I've never lost._


End file.
